Female choreographers come to the fore at this year’s Dance Umbrella
This year’s 27th Dance Umbrella festival promises to unravel a range of complex relationships between viewers and performers through different conversations and collaborations.
The opening performance on Thursday evening, On Fire: the Invention of Tradition, choreographed by Constanza Macras, consists of a mixed cast of South African and Berlin-based performers in collaboration with the Joburg-based artist, Ayana V Jackson. Not only does it set the tone for the kinds of themes emanating from the works in the programme, but also signals some recurring preoccupations among the variety of choreographers featured in this year’s programme, most of whom are women.
In fact, this year’s festival has placed particular emphasis on female choreo-graphers: of the 15 commissioned, 10 are female. This is a way to reflect the shift that has taken place behind the scenes where a new generation of female choreographers are finally emerging, challenging what has been a male-dominated arena for some time.
However, this shift is no longer about who gets to determine what unfolds on stage, but rather how these tensions play out between personal biographies, histories and geographies in the works. A work that appears to exploit this is the collaboration between Nelisiwe Xaba and German curators, Anna Wagner and Eike Wittrock. Performed and choreographed by Xaba, Fremde Tänze is in many ways about”returning the gaze” – turning attention on Europeans.
The performance is based on research done while in residency at the Julius-Hans-Spiegel-Zentrum, a choreographic and academic research facility, in 2014. During this time Xaba re-interpreted and produced a narrative of short modern dance pieces by early pioneers of modern dance in Germany and Western Europe, who in the 1910s and 1920s looked to “foreign” lands for inspiration.
The narrative is based on exoticism – who is exotic and what makes them so? – and how this has historically been interpreted in a dance realm.
It is almost impossible to speak of this relationship without drawing on the story of Saartjie Baartman and a more contemporary example narrated through the story of Josephine Baker. Although both stories differ in many ways, they highlight the preoccupation with the black female body on display. Of course, Baker sought to maintain the gaze of her audience.
This often imbalanced relation between who is looking versus who is being looked at, is also suggested in Mamela Nyamza’s Wena Mamela. A personal account of being a black South African woman and dance artist, Mamela is not only about dismantling patriarchal roles assigned to black women, but also about challenging oneself and the traditions that often present limitations for black female dancers and choreographers.
Perhaps this is what makes Xaba and Nyamza’s approaches significant: that despite the historical baggage the black female body carries, both have been able to whittle away the many layers of the politics of the body.
In a country lagging behind in fore-grounding social issues related to gender and race, Dance Umbrella is important in generating debate and dialogue around identity and representation. In contemporary dance these relationships become complicated by the intricacies of what happens in the spaces between the performer, the performance and the audience. The female body remains a site for politics, trauma and all kinds of assertions of power, possession and ownership. The black female body in particular, has navigated through these murky debates in challenging ways that begin to choreograph a hybrid yet uneasy interchange between the viewer and the performer.
It will be interesting to see how these interrelations play out on stage in this year’s Dance Umbrella, which opens on Thursday evening. The programme looks set to leave audiences with questions about how we see ourselves.
• Info: www.danceforumsouthafrica.co.za.
• Mdluli is a participant of the Dance Writers Workshop funded by the Goethe-Institut.